Friday, February 27, 2015

Why the Rise of Fascism is again the Issue

Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. “I believe in
American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama,
evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the
historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee,
Carl Schmitt, who said, “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.”
This sums up Americanism, the world’s dominant ideology. That it
remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an
equally unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented
wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western
culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of
it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had
destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13
million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were
400,000. Hollywood reversed this.

The recent 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was a
reminder of the great crime of fascism, whose Nazi iconography is
embedded in our consciousness. Fascism is preserved as history, as
flickering footage of goose-stepping blackshirts, their criminality
terrible and clear. Yet in the same liberal societies, whose war-making
elites urge us never to forget, the accelerating danger of a modern kind
of fascism is suppressed; for it is their fascism.
“To initiate a war of aggression…,” said the Nuremberg Tribunal
judges in 1946, “is not only an international crime, it is the supreme
international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it
contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Had the Nazis not invaded Europe, Auschwitz and the Holocaust would
not have happened. Had the United States and its satellites not
initiated their war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, almost a million
people would be alive today; and Islamic State, or ISIS, would not have
us in thrall to its savagery. They are the progeny of modern fascism,
weaned by the bombs, bloodbaths and lies that are the surreal theatre
known as news.
Like the fascism of the 1930s and 1940s, big lies are delivered with
the precision of a metronome: thanks to an omnipresent, repetitive media
and its virulent censorship by omission. Take the catastrophe in Libya.
In 2011, Nato launched 9,700 “strike sorties” against Libya, of which
more than a third were aimed at civilian targets. Uranium warheads were
used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red
Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the
children killed] were under the age of ten”.
The public sodomising of the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi with a
“rebel” bayonet was greeted by the then US Secretary of State, Hillary
Clinton, with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.” His murder, like
the destruction of his country, was justified with a familiar big lie;
he was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew … that if we
waited one more day,” said President Obama, “Benghazi, a city the size
of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated
across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
This was the fabrication of Islamist militias facing defeat by Libyan
government forces. They told Reuters there would be “a real bloodbath, a
massacre like we saw in Rwanda”. Reported on March 14, 2011, the lie
provided the first spark for Nato’s inferno, described by David Cameron
as a “humanitarian intervention”.
Secretly supplied and trained by Britain’s SAS, many of the “rebels”
would become ISIS, whose latest video offering shows the beheading of 21
Coptic Christian workers seized in Sirte, the city destroyed on their
behalf by Nato bombers.
For Obama, Cameron and Hollande, Gaddafi’s true crime was Libya’s
economic independence and his declared intention to stop selling
Africa’s greatest oil reserves in US dollars. The petrodollar is a
pillar of American imperial power. Gaddafi audaciously planned to
underwrite a common African currency backed by gold, establish an
all-Africa bank and promote economic union among poor countries with
prized resources. Whether or not this would happen, the very notion was
intolerable to the US as it prepared to “enter” Africa and bribe African
governments with military “partnerships”.
Following Nato’s attack under cover of a Security Council resolution,
Obama, wrote Garikai Chengu, “confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s
Central Bank, which Gaddafi had earmarked for the establishment of an
African Central Bank and the African gold backed dinar currency”.
The “humanitarian war” against Libya drew on a model close to western
liberal hearts, especially in the media. In 1999, Bill Clinton and Tony
Blair sent Nato to bomb Serbia, because, they lied, the Serbs were
committing “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in the secessionist
province of Kosovo. David Scheffer, US ambassador-at-large for war
crimes [sic], claimed that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged
between 14 and 59″ might have been murdered. Both Clinton and Blair
evoked the Holocaust and “the spirit of the Second World War”. The
West’s heroic allies were the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose
criminal record was set aside. The British Foreign Secretary, Robin
Cook, told them to call him any time on his mobile phone.
With the Nato bombing over, and much of Serbia’s infrastructure in
ruins, along with schools, hospitals, monasteries and the national TV
station, international forensic teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume
evidence of the “holocaust”. The FBI failed to find a single mass grave
and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader
angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda
machines”. A year later, a United Nations tribunal on Yugoslavia
announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. This included
combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There
was no genocide. The “holocaust” was a lie. The Nato attack had been
fraudulent.
Behind the lie, there was serious purpose. Yugoslavia was a uniquely
independent, multi-ethnic federation that had stood as a political and
economic bridge in the Cold War. Most of its utilities and major
manufacturing was publicly owned. This was not acceptable to the
expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had
begun a drive east to capture its “natural market” in the Yugoslav
provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at
Maastricht in 1991 to lay their plans for the disastrous eurozone, a
secret deal had been struck; Germany would recognise Croatia. Yugoslavia
was doomed.
In Washington, the US saw that the struggling Yugoslav economy was
denied World Bank loans. Nato, then an almost defunct Cold War relic,
was reinvented as imperial enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo “peace” conference
in Rambouillet, in France, the Serbs were subjected to the enforcer’s
duplicitous tactics. The Rambouillet accord included a secret Annex B,
which the US delegation inserted on the last day. This demanded the
military occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia — a country with bitter
memories of the Nazi occupation — and the implementation of a
“free-market economy” and the privatisation of all government assets. No
sovereign state could sign this. Punishment followed swiftly; Nato
bombs fell on a defenceless country. It was the precursor to the
catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, and Ukraine.
Since 1945, more than a third of the membership of the United Nations
– 69 countries – have suffered some or all of the following at the
hands of America’s modern fascism. They have been invaded, their
governments overthrown, their popular movements suppressed, their
elections subverted, their people bombed and their economies stripped of
all protection, their societies subjected to a crippling siege known as
“sanctions”. The British historian Mark Curtis estimates the death toll
in the millions. In every case, a big lie was deployed.
“Tonight, for the first time since 9/11, our combat mission in
Afghanistan is over.” These were opening words of Obama’s 2015 State of
the Union address. In fact, some 10,000 troops and 20,000 military
contractors (mercenaries) remain in Afghanistan on indefinite
assignment. “The longest war in American history is coming to a
responsible conclusion,” said Obama. In fact, more civilians were killed
in Afghanistan in 2014 than in any year since the UN took records. The
majority have been killed — civilians and soldiers — during Obama’s
time as president.
The tragedy of Afghanistan rivals the epic crime in Indochina. In
his lauded and much quoted book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy
and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of
US policies from Afghanistan to the present day, writes that if America
is to control Eurasia and dominate the world, it cannot sustain a
popular democracy, because “the pursuit of power is not a goal that
commands popular passion . . . Democracy is inimical to imperial
mobilisation.” He is right. As WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden have
revealed, a surveillance and police state is usurping democracy. In
1976, Brzezinski, then President Carter’s National Security Advisor,
demonstrated his point by dealing a death blow to Afghanistan’s first
and only democracy. Who knows this vital history?
In the 1960s, a popular revolution swept Afghanistan, the poorest
country on earth, eventually overthrowing the vestiges of the
aristocratic regime in 1978. The People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA) formed a government and declared a reform programme
that included the abolition of feudalism, freedom for all religions,
equal rights for women and social justice for the ethnic minorities.
More than 13,000 political prisoners were freed and police files
publicly burned.
The new government introduced free medical care for the poorest;
peonage was abolished, a mass literacy programme was launched. For
women, the gains were unheard of. By the late 1980s, half the university
students were women, and women made up almost half of Afghanistan’s
doctors, a third of civil servants and the majority of teachers. “Every
girl,” recalled Saira Noorani, a female surgeon,

“could go to high school and university. We could go
where we wanted and wear what we liked. We used to go to cafes and the
cinema to see the latest Indian film on a Friday and listen to the
latest music. It all started to go wrong when the mujaheddin started
winning. They used to kill teachers and burn schools. We were terrified.
It was funny and sad to think these were the people the West
supported.”

The PDPA government was backed by the Soviet Union, even though, as
former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance later admitted, “there was no
evidence of any Soviet complicity [in the revolution]“. Alarmed by the
growing confidence of liberation movements throughout the world,
Brzezinski decided that if Afghanistan was to succeed under the PDPA,
its independence and progress would offer the “threat of a promising
example”.
On July 3, 1979, the White House secretly authorised $500 million in
arms and logistics to support tribal “fundamentalist” groups known as
the mujaheddin. The aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan’s first
secular, reformist government. In August 1979, the US embassy in Kabul
reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by
the demise of [the PDPA government], despite whatever setbacks this
might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.” The
italics are mine.
The mujaheddin were the forebears of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They
included Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who received tens of millions of dollars
in cash from the CIA. Hekmatyar’s specialty was trafficking in opium and
throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.
Invited to London, he was lauded by Prime Minister Thatcher as a
“freedom fighter”.
Such fanatics might have remained in their tribal world had
Brzezinski not launched an international movement to promote Islamic
fundamentalism in Central Asia and so undermine secular political
liberation and “destabilise” the Soviet Union, creating, as he wrote in
his autobiography, “a few stirred up Muslims”. His grand plan coincided
with the ambitions of the Pakistani dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, to
dominate the region. In 1986, the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence
agency, the ISI, began to recruit people from around the world to join
the Afghan jihad. The Saudi multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden was one of
them. Operatives who would eventually join the Taliban and al-Qaeda,
were recruited at an Islamic college in Brooklyn, New York, and given
paramilitary training at a CIA camp in Virginia. This was called
“Operation Cyclone”. Its success was celebrated in 1996 when the last
PDPA president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah — who had gone before
the UN General Assembly to plead for help — was hanged from a
streetlight by the Taliban.
The “blowback” of Operation Cyclone and its “few stirred up Muslims”
was September 11, 2001. Operation Cyclone became the “war on terror”, in
which countless men, women and children would lose their lives across
the Muslim world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Syria.
The enforcer’s message was and remains: “You are with us or against us.”
The common thread in fascism, past and present, is mass murder. The
American invasion of Vietnam had its “free fire zones”, “body counts”
and “collatoral damage”. In the province of Quang Ngai, where I reported
from, many thousands of civilians (“gooks”) were murdered by the US;
yet only one massacre, at My Lai, is remembered. In Laos and Cambodia,
the greatest aerial bombardment in history produced an epoch of terror
marked today by the spectacle of joined-up bomb craters which, from the
air, resemble monstrous necklaces. The bombing gave Cambodia its own
ISIS, led by Pol Pot.
Today, the world’s greatest single campaign of terror entails the
execution of entire families, guests at weddings, mourners at funerals.
These are Obama’s victims. According to the New York Times, Obama makes
his selection from a CIA “kill list” presented to him every Tuesday in
the White House Situation Room. He then decides, without a shred of
legal justification, who will live and who will die. His execution
weapon is the Hellfire missile carried by a pilotless aircraft known as a
drone; these roast their victims and festoon the area with their
remains. Each “hit” is registered on a faraway console screen as a
“bugsplat”.
“For goose-steppers,” wrote the historian Norman Pollock, “substitute
the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And
for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work,
planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”
Uniting fascism old and new is the cult of superiority. “I believe in
American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama,
evoking declarations of national fetishism from the 1930s. As the
historian Alfred W. McCoy has pointed out, it was the Hitler devotee,
Carl Schmitt, who said, “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.”
This sums up Americanism, the world’s dominant ideology. That it
remains unrecognised as a predatory ideology is the achievement of an
equally unrecognised brainwashing. Insidious, undeclared, presented
wittily as enlightenment on the march, its conceit insinuates western
culture. I grew up on a cinematic diet of American glory, almost all of
it a distortion. I had no idea that it was the Red Army that had
destroyed most of the Nazi war machine, at a cost of as many as 13
million soldiers. By contrast, US losses, including in the Pacific, were
400,000. Hollywood reversed this.
The difference now is that cinema audiences are invited to wring
their hands at the “tragedy” of American psychopaths having to kill
people in distant places — just as the President himself kills them. The
embodiment of Hollywood’s violence, the actor and director Clint
Eastwood, was nominated for an Oscar this year for his movie, American
Sniper, which is about a licensed murderer and nutcase. The New York
Times described it as a “patriotic, pro-family picture which broke all
attendance records in its opening days”.
There are no heroic movies about America’s embrace of fascism. During
the Second World War, America (and Britain) went to war against Greeks
who had fought heroically against Nazism and were resisting the rise of
Greek fascism. In 1967, the CIA helped bring to power a fascist military
junta in Athens — as it did in Brazil and most of Latin America.
Germans and east Europeans who had colluded with Nazi aggression and
crimes against humanity were given safe haven in the US; many were
pampered and their talents rewarded. Wernher von Braun was the “father”
of both the Nazi V-2 terror bomb and the US space programme.
In the 1990s, as former Soviet republics, eastern Europe and the
Balkans became military outposts of Nato, the heirs to a Nazi movement
in Ukraine were given their opportunity. Responsible for the deaths of
thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians during the Nazi invasion of the
Soviet Union, Ukrainian fascism was rehabilitated and its “new wave”
hailed by the enforcer as “nationalists”.
This reached its apogee in 2014 when the Obama administration
splashed out $5 billion on a coup against the elected government. The
shock troops were neo-Nazis known as the Right Sector and Svoboda. Their
leaders include Oleh Tyahnybok, who has called for a purge of the
“Moscow-Jewish mafia” and “other scum”, including gays, feminists and
those on the political left.
These fascists are now integrated into the Kiev coup government. The
first deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andriy Parubiy, a
leader of the governing party, is co-founder of Svoboda. On February 14,
Parubiy announced he was flying to Washington get “the USA to give us
highly precise modern weaponry”. If he succeeds, it will be seen as an
act of war by Russia.
No western leader has spoken up about the revival of fascism in the
heart of Europe — with the exception of Vladimir Putin, whose people
lost 22 million to a Nazi invasion that came through the borderland of
Ukraine. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Obama’s Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland,
ranted abuse about European leaders for opposing the US arming of the
Kiev regime. She referred to the German Defence Minister as “the
minister for defeatism”. It
was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev . The wife of Robert D.
Kagan, a leading “neo-con” luminary and co-founder of the extreme right
wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor
to Dick Cheney.
Nuland’s coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing
Russia’s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The
mostly Russian population of Crimea — illegally annexed to Ukraine by
Nikita Krushchev in 1954 — voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as
they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and
internationally observed. There was no invasion.
At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian
population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleaning. Deploying
neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid
to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon,
cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social
security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the
border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping
“the violence” caused by the “Russian invasion”. The Nato commander,
General Breedlove — whose name and actions might have been inspired by
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — announced that 40,000 Russian troops
were “massing”. In the age of forensic satellite evidence, he offered
none.
These Russian-speaking and bilingual people of Ukraine – a third of
the population – have long sought a federation that reflects the
country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of
Moscow. Most are not “separatists” but citizens who want to live
securely in their homeland and oppose the power grab in Kiev. Their
revolt and establishment of autonomous “states” are a reaction to Kiev’s
attacks on them. Little of this has been explained to western
audiences.
On May 2, 2014, in Odessa, 41 ethnic Russians were burned alive in
the trade union headquarters with police standing by. The Right Sector
leader Dmytro Yarosh hailed the massacre as “another bright day in our
national history”. In the American and British media, this was reported
as a “murky tragedy” resulting from “clashes” between “nationalists”
(neo-Nazis) and “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a
referendum on a federal Ukraine).
The New York Times buried the story, having dismissed as Russian
propaganda warnings about the fascist and anti-Semitic policies of
Washington’s new clients. The Wall Street Journal damned the victims –
“Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”. Obama
congratulated the junta for its “restraint”.
If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained
“pariah” role in the West will justify the lie that Russia is invading
Ukraine. On January 29, Ukraine’s top military commander, General Viktor
Muzhemko, almost inadvertently dismissed the very basis for US and EU
sanctions on Russia when he told a news conference emphatically: “The
Ukrainian army is not fighting with the regular units of the Russian
Army”. There were “individual citizens” who were members of “illegal
armed groups”, but there was no Russian invasion. This was not news.
Vadym Prystaiko, Kiev’s Deputy Foreign Minister, has called for “full
scale war” with nuclear-armed Russia.
On February 21, US Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma,
introduced a bill that would authorise American arms for the Kiev
regime. In his Senate presentation, Inhofe used photographs he claimed
were of Russian troops crossing into Ukraine, which have long been
exposed as fakes. It was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s fake pictures of
a Soviet installation in Nicaragua, and Colin Powell’s fake evidence to
the UN of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The intensity of the smear campaign against Russia and the portrayal
of its president as a pantomime villain is unlike anything I have known
as a reporter. Robert Parry, one of America’s most distinguished
investigative journalists, who revealed the Iran-Contra scandal, wrote
recently,

“No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany,
has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic
population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet
across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious
effort to cover up this reality even to the point of ignoring facts that
have been well established ….If you wonder how the world could stumble
into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago –
all you need to do is look at the madness over Ukraine that has proved
impervious to facts or reason.”

In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media:

“The use made by Nazi conspirators of psychological
warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few
exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign
calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people
psychologically for the attack …. In the propaganda system of the Hitler
State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important
weapons.”

In the Guardian on February 2, Timothy Garton-Ash called, in effect,
for a world war. “Putin must be stopped,” said the headline. “And
sometimes only guns can stop guns.” He conceded that the threat of war
might “nourish a Russian paranoia of encirclement”; but that was fine.
He name-checked the military equipment needed for the job and advised
his readers that “America has the best kit”.
In 2003, Garton-Ash, an Oxford professor, repeated the propaganda
that led to the slaughter in Iraq. Saddam Hussein, he wrote, “has, as
[Colin] Powell documented, stockpiled large quantities of horrifying
chemical and biological weapons, and is hiding what remains of them. He
is still trying to get nuclear ones.” He lauded Blair as a “Gladstonian,
Christian liberal interventionist”. In 2006, he wrote, “Now we face
the next big test of the West after Iraq: Iran.”
The outbursts — or as Garton-Ash prefers, his “tortured liberal
ambivalence” — are not untypical of those in the transatlantic liberal
elite who have struck a Faustian deal. The war criminal Blair is their
lost leader. The Guardian, in which Garton-Ash’s piece appeared,
published a full-page advertisement for an American Stealth bomber. On a
menacing image of the Lockheed Martin monster were the words: “The
F-35. GREAT For Britain”. This American “kit” will cost British
taxpayers £1.3 billion, its F-model predecessors having slaughtered
across the world. In tune with its advertiser, a Guardian editorial has
demanded an increase in military spending.
Once again, there is serious purpose. The rulers of the world want
Ukraine not only as a missile base; they want its economy. Kiev’s new
Finance Minister, Nataliwe Jaresko, is a former senior US State
Department official in charge of US overseas “investment”. She was
hurriedly given Ukrainian citizenship.
They want Ukraine for its abundant gas; Vice President Joe Biden’s
son is on the board of Ukraine’s biggest oil, gas and fracking company.
The manufacturers of GM seeds, companies such as the infamous Monsanto,
want Ukraine’s rich farming soil.
Above all, they want Ukraine’s mighty neighbour, Russia. They want to
Balkanise or dismember Russia and exploit the greatest source of
natural gas on earth. As the Arctic ice melts, they want control of the
Arctic Ocean and its energy riches, and Russia’s long Arctic land
border. Their man in Moscow used to be Boris Yeltsin, a drunk, who
handed his country’s economy to the West. His successor, Putin, has
re-established Russia as a sovereign nation; that is his crime.
The responsibility of the rest of us is clear. It is to identify and
expose the reckless lies of warmongers and never to collude with them.
It is to re-awaken the great popular movements that brought a fragile
civilisation to modern imperial states. Most important, it is to prevent
the conquest of ourselves: our minds, our humanity, our self respect.
If we remain silent, victory over us is assured, and a holocaust
beckons.